NVIDIA are taking high-performance mobile gaming to a new level today with the introduction of their GeForce 8M series GPUs for notebooks, this launch to coincide with Intel's new Centrino Duo (Santa Rosa) notebook platform today as well.

This family of mobile GPUs shares many characteristics with the desktop GeForce 8 series including DX10 support and NVIDIA's 2nd gen PureVideo technology for hardware HD video decoding.

There is one area though where the 8M family really shines in comparison to the desktop GeForce 8 series, and that is the shader performance thanks to some additional tweaking by the NVIDIA team since they rolled out their desktop parts.

Five variants of the 8M series exist upon launch, these being the GeForce 8600M GT, 8600M GS, 8400M GT, 8400M GS and the 8400M G. The top three cards will sport 512MB of memory on a 128-bit interface whilst the 8400M GS and 8400M G models will carry 256MB on 64-bit.

Unfortunately an 8800 derived mobile part doesnt make it into the lineup just yet, no thanks to the current 90nm form of the desktop models. Once NVIDIA manage to shrink it down i'm sure a mobile 8800 will show up soon after.

NVIDIA's press release can be found here, and there's also some coverage via the below links :-

SANTA CLARA, CA - May 9, 2007- NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced a new family of NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series of graphics processors targeted at the newly evolved notebook PC market. These new GPUs (graphics processing units) help power a whole, new generation of notebook PCs that deliver the ultimate visual experience for Windows Vista, DirectX 10 games, HD movies, and popular applications like Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Live Maps-changing the way users see and interact with their computers through enhanced visual quality, responsiveness and ease-of-use.

The new GeForce 8M Series notebook GPUs-the world's first to support DirectX 10 and fully accelerate decoding of H.264 full HD movies-are available now from the top PC makers such as HP, Toshiba, Acer, Samsung, and ASUS.